Ray Sadecki, Who Helped Cardinals Win World Series

Sadecki, a left-hander who finished his career with the Mets, was 19 when he reached the majors, joining the Cardinals in 1960 and establishing himself as a starter. He helped the team become a reliable winner. Six seasons later, he left in a trade that also helped the Cardinals win.

In his second season with St. Louis, he pitched 222 innings, with a 14-10 record and an earned run average of 3.72, the 10th best in the National League. Three years later, he and the Cardinals had breakout seasons.

Pitching 220 innings, Sadecki won 20 games in 1964. His victory total was the third best in the league, but he was probably only the Cardinals’ third-best starter, behind Bob Gibson, who won 19 games, and Curt Simmons, who won 18.

A late-season surge, coupled with a remarkable collapse by the Philadelphia Phillies, helped the Cardinals win the pennant. They defeated the Yankees in the World Series in seven games.

George Shuba, Whose Handshake Heralded Racial Tolerance in Baseball

George Shuba greeted Jackie Robinson, right, when Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in a minor league game in 1946. Credit Associated Press

George Shuba, the Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder who played in three World Series during the 1950s but who was best remembered for his welcoming gesture to Jackie Robinson at home plate on the day Robinson, as a minor leaguer, broke baseball’s color barrier, died on Monday at his home in Youngstown, Ohio. He was 89. His son, Michael, confirmed the death.

Playing in Brooklyn for seven seasons, Shuba was usually a backup, but he had his moments. Known as Shotgun for his ability to spray line drives, like buckshot, out of his left-handed batting stance, he batted .305 for the Dodgers’ 1952 National League pennant-winner. He was the first National Leaguer to hit a pinch-hit homer in the World Series, connecting for a two-run drive off Allie Reynolds at Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of the 1953 Series.

But his career was most pointedly defined in Jersey City, by an image at home plate at Roosevelt Stadium two years before Shuba made his major league debut.

But his career was most pointedly defined in Jersey City, by an image at home plate at Roosevelt Stadium two years before Shuba made his major league debut.

On the afternoon of April 18, 1946, Robinson became the first black player in modern organized baseball when he made his debut with the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm team in their International League opener against the Jersey City Giants.

Shuba in 1948. Credit The New York Times

In the third inning, Robinson hit a three-run homer over the left-field fence. When he completed his trip around the bases, Shuba, the Royals’ left fielder and their next batter, shook his hand.

Congratulating a home-run hitter was a commonplace ritual, but Shuba’s welcome to a smiling Robinson was captured in an Associated Press photograph that has endured as a portrait of racial tolerance.

“I couldn’t care less if Jackie was Technicolor,” Shuba told The Montreal Gazette on the 60th anniversary of that handshake. “We’d spent 30 days at spring training, and we all knew that Jackie had been a great athlete at U.C.L.A. As far as I was concerned, he was a great ballplayer — our best. I had no problem going to the plate to shake his hand instead of waiting for him to come by me in the on-deck circle.”

Robinson had four hits in five plate appearances that afternoon in the Royals’ 14-1 victory. In their second game of the season, Shuba hit three home runs.

Don Zimmer, Who Spent 60 Eventful Years in Baseball, Dies at 83

Don Zimmer, left, and Joe Torre in 2000. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times 

 

From loathed Red Sox to lovable Yank.

 

Don Zimmer, the stubby, Popeye-muscled baseball lifer with the unforgettable jowls whose passion for the game endured through more than 60 years as a player, manager, coach and adviser, died on Wednesday in Dunedin, Fla. He was 83. His death was announced by the Tampa Bay Rays, a team he served recently as a senior adviser.  Zimmer had surgery April 16 to repair a leaky heart valve, according to The Tampa Tribune.

Zimmer had been having kidney dialysis since May 2012 after falling into a diabetic coma at his home. But he continued to visit the Rays’ Tropicana Field when he could.

Zimmer was married on a baseball diamond in 1951, and it seemed he never left the field.

He played the infield for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ only World Series championship team, he was an original member of the Mets and he was Yankee Manager Joe Torre’s confidant as his bench coach on four World Series championship teams. He filled in as the Yankees’ manager for 36 games in 1999 when Torre was being treated for prostate cancer.

“All I’ve ever been is a simple baseball man, but it’s never ceased to amaze me how so many far more accomplished people I’ve met in this life wanted to be one, too,” he said in “The Zen of Zim,” (2004) written with Bill Madden. “What a game, this baseball!”

Bill Madden in NY Daily News

Chicago Tribune: Former Cubs manager Don Zimmer dies at 83

Zimmer in 1999 Don Zimmer visits Greg Maddux on the mound during a 1999 game in Wrigley Field. (ED WAGNER, CHICAGO TRIBUNE /May 4, 1999)

His exit was also one of the most memorable in Cubs history. Zimmer handed an ultimatum to Tribune Co. executive Don Grenesko to give him a contract extension early in the 1991 season, asking for the same kind of security the players had.

“Am I any different?” Zimmer said he told Grenesko. “What am I? A piece of garbage in Lake Michigan?”

The ploy didn't work, and Zimmer was fired after 37 games. In typical fashion, he invited the beat writers into his New York hotel suite and told them to empty out the minibar so he could charge it to the team.

In 1989, Zimmer reached the zenith of his managerial career, throwing out the book and using crazy strategy to great success, including squeeze bunts with the bases loaded and a triple-steal with a pitcher at the plate.

Tampa Bay Tribune
ST. PETERSBURG — Don Zimmer, whose long and star-crossed career linked baseball’s golden age of the mid-1950s to the present, allowing him to tell tales of Jackie Robinson and Derek Jeter, died Wednesday.

Zimmer said he never drew a paycheck outside of baseball. When asked how he supported his family in the offseason back when players’ salaries were a fraction of what they are today, Zimmer answered with two words: “Winter ball.”

He spent winters in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico honing his craft.

He played winter ball after his rookie season in 1954, teaming with future hall of famers Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. Zimmer and was named the MVP of the Caribbean World Series that winter.

Cincinnati Enquirer: Don Zimmer, West High and MLB great, dies

To the rest of the major leagues, Don Zimmer was a a Popeye lookalike, a prominent-cheeked baseball lifer who in 66 professional seasons once won a World Series with Jackie Robinson, once stole home 10 times in one minor-league season, once famously grappled with Pedro Martinez on the mound in a playoff game at Fenway Park.

To Cincinnati, Don Zimmer was a West Side legend, part of formidable Western Hills High and Bentley Post American Legion teams with Jim Frey and Glenn Sample, long forgiven for being on the other side in the fabled 1975 World Series when he coached third for the Red Sox.

Only a portion of one of his 66 seasons was spent with the Reds, 1962, .250 with a couple of homers and 16 RBI. That never mattered.

Sidney J. Blatt, a psychologist whose theory about the origins of depression guided treatment decisions for a generation of psychotherapists and helped deepen scientists’ appreciation of the diverse nature of chronic distress, died on May 11 in Hamden, Conn. He was 85.

Dr. Blatt was a widely published Freudian analyst at Yale in the 1970s when he began arguing in essays and scientific reports that personality developed along two intertwined pathways, one focused on identity and the other on relationships.

Disruptions in either pathway could cause identical symptoms of depression, he wrote, yet the two conditions were distinct and called for different treatment approaches. The identity-based depression — “I am a failure” — responded well to classical psychoanalysis, with the therapist as a passive listener, helping to elicit growth in an independent sense of self; the relationship-based type — “I am unlovable” — could be relieved more effectively by a more assertive therapist, guiding the formation of relationships.

Thousands of psychoanalysts integrated this theory into their practice, and its practical implications contributed to a debate about how (or if) Freud’s classic approach might be adapted for fundamentally different conditions. In the 1980s and ’90s, when tempers flared between these therapists and those who favored alternatives like medications or short-term talk therapy, Dr. Blatt emerged as a moderating influence, an easygoing presence who could move between opposing camps and integrate their ideas.

“He was like Joe Torre that way,” said Zindel Segal, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. “He had this ability to keep a disparate group together and focused on a common goal, which in this case was getting real clarity on these subtypes of depression.”

Productive throughout his career, Dr. Blatt published more than 200 papers and scores of monographs and books, including “Polarities of Experience” in 2008 and “The Theory and Treatment of Depression” in 2005, which he coedited. He also remained ever loyal to his Freudian roots.

He based his conclusions on case studies, observations and analyses of study data. But as a rule he avoided doing randomized clinical trials, the rigorously controlled studies considered the gold standard of evidence throughout medicine and in psychology.

“I’ve learned an enormous amount from my patients,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Therapy has been a way of being intellectually active and discovering, and at the same time caring and compassionate. I couldn’t think of a better profession.”

Eddie O’Brien, Who Played for Pirates With His Twin

Eddie O’Brien, left, and his brother Johnny, right, also starred for the Seattle University baseball team. They are pictured here with Pittsburgh Pirates Manager Fred Haney. Credit via David Eskenazi Collection

 Eddie O’Brien and his twin, Johnny, were basketball and baseball stars at St. Mary’s High School in South Amboy, N.J., but when they graduated in 1948, their athletic careers seemed to be over. They were only 5 feet 9 inches tall, and no college program wanted them.

But by the mid-1950s, the O’Brien twins had become familiar figures on the national sports scene.

When Eddie O’Brien died in the Seattle area on Feb. 21 at 83, he was remembered for teaming with Johnny to bring Seattle University to national basketball prominence, then joining him as a middle infielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Their potential as college athletes was recognized while they were playing in a national semipro baseball tournament in Wichita, Kan., in 1949. They faced a team that included a first baseman named Al Brightman, who happened to be the Seattle University baseball and basketball coach.

The game went into extra innings.

“In the 12th, I got on first and Brightman asks, ‘How are your grades?’ ” Eddie O’Brien once told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I told him: ‘I can’t talk to you now. I just got the steal sign,’ and I stole second. That was it. A week later, we got scholarship offers in a telegram.”

Ralph Kiner

A gem of a human being.

http://goo.gl/IWEi22

http://goo.gl/9UYAX6


Times obit
His genial, well-informed and occasionally tongue-twisted presence accompanied all of Mets history, from the verbal high jinks of Casey Stengel and the fielding high jinks of Marv Throneberry to the arrival of the fireballer Tom Seaver and the miraculous World Series championship of 1969, from the thrilling 1986 Series victory over the Red Sox to the dispiriting Subway Series loss to the Yankees in 2000 and the Madoff-poisoned, injury-riddled ill fortune of recent seasons.

Kiner, who hit 369 homers, playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947. Associated Press

Over half a century of Met broadcasts, while sharing the microphone with Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Tim McCarver — whom he once called Tim MacArthur — among many others, Kiner proved himself especially valuable in explaining the nuances of hitting, and though occasionally criticized for a flat affect and a penchant for phrase-bungling — “On Father’s Day we again wish you all happy birthday!” — he was known as an amusing raconteur who was generally well prepared with both facts and stories, and his intended wit was often as memorable as his unintended humor.

“Two-thirds of the earth is covered by water,” he declared about an especially fleet outfielder. “The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.” Cutting to a commercial after mistaking McCarver’s name for that of the World War II general, he said: “MacArthur once said ‘I shall return,’ and we’ll be back after this.”

Smooth as silk.


Malaprops Were Part of the Charm of Kiner, an Enduring Met
“He once dropped a name on us, Frenchy Bordagaray, which I couldn’t pronounce or make any reference to,” said Howie Rose, his former partner on cable TV. “But I did a little homework and learned about his career. When I hear younger fans criticize older broadcasters for their references to players from past generations, I wonder, ‘Do you have an ounce of curiosity?’ ”
 

His lack of pretension and his wit and amiability made “Kiner’s Korner,” his postgame show, required viewing, even if it looked like public access programming. In its debut from the Polo Grounds, Mets Manager Casey Stengel forgot to remove his microphone as he left the interview and brought the set down.

“Hold up the cue cards because we have to get to commercial so I can get off the air,” Kiner recalled telling his production assistant during an interview in 2012.

Another story from McCarver. He and Kiner were calling a Mets game in Philadelphia. Walking through the press box were Jamie Lee Curtis and her husband, Christopher Guest.

“They’re huge Phillies fans, and they came in and were introduced to us,” McCarver said. “But Ralph wants a moment with her because he had once dated her mother, Janet Leigh. So he sheepishly approaches her and says, ‘Jamie Lee, my name’s Ralph Kiner, and you were just introduced to us and I wanted to tell you that I used to date your mother.’ And she throws her arms around his neck and says, ‘Daddy!’ ”

Lee McPhail

From NYT obituary:

Leland Stanford MacPhail Jr. was born on Oct. 25, 1917, in Nashville. He graduated from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he played baseball and football. In 1941 he became the business manager of the Dodgers’ Interstate League farm team in Reading, Pa., while his father was bringing a pennant to Brooklyn for the first time in 21 years as the Dodgers’ general manager.

Except for teaching history at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and serving in the Navy during World War II, Mr. MacPhail said, “my whole working life was baseball.”

In his autobiography, “My 9 Innings,” published in 1989, Mr. MacPhail was self-effacing in describing the scene when he would go home after a day at the ballpark.

“When I came out after a game, there were a gang of kids waiting to get the players’ autographs, and especially in my younger days I would be mobbed,” he wrote. “Someone at the back of the group would yell, ‘Who is it?’ and then one of the kids who had gotten my autograph would exclaim in disgust, ‘Oh, he’s nobody.’ But you couldn’t not sign; they wouldn’t believe it if you tried to tell them you were nobody.”

In 1998, 20 years after his father was inducted, Lee MacPhail was enshrined at Cooperstown.

Slugger in Yankee Golden Era

Bill Skowron, the slugging first baseman who played on seven pennant-winning teams with the Yankees in the 1950s and early ’60s, died on Friday in Arlington Heights, Ill. He was 81.

Harmon Killebrew

During his prime, Killebrew was a slugger of mythical status. In American League cities, fathers would take their sons to the ballpark and point to places Killebrew reached with his prodigious power. He once hit a ball over the left-field roof at Tiger Stadium. When he returned to the hotel, he had messages from six different people who claimed to have the souvenir. They didn't know the head groundskeeper had walked out behind the stadium, found the ball resting near a drain pipe, and gave it to Killebrew as a keepsake.

I once saw him hit one in the old Yankee Stadium that the shortstop jumped for; it hit the outfield wall so hard that it bounced back to the left fielder, and Killebrew had a single. He was slow, but that ball must have bounced back 200 feet.

This May 29, 1959, file photo shows Harmon Killebrew, of the Washington Senators, shaking hands with President Dwight D. Eisenhower before the start of a baseball game against Boston, in Washington. At center is Calvin Griffith, president of the Senators. Hall of Famer Killebrew, known for his tape-measure home runs, died Tuesday, May 17, 2011, at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 74. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)  The Senators moved out of DC in 1961, and went to Minnesota.

Numerous obits are appearing. One from legacy;

Changed Japanese Baseball

Kyodo News, via Associated Press - Wally Yonamine, the manager of Chunichi Dragons in 1974, was swarmed after his team won the Central League championship. He was also a three-time batting champion in Japan.

 Wally Yonamine, who was the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II, has often been compared to Jackie Robinson for “integrating” the Japanese game. When he made his debut for the Yomiuri Giants in 1951, Yonamine was reviled by fans and players alike, who resented his otherness, just as Robinson had been vilified four years earlier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. At a time when anti-American sentiment was rife in Japan — memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh — Yonamine endured catcalls and worse. Rocks and bottles were hurled at him from the stands. The Hawaiian-born son of Japanese parents, he was not only the enemy, he was a traitor.

 Remarkably, Yonamine was a pioneering athlete in two sports and in two countries. A speedy running back — 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds — he starred for a football team in the Army and, after his discharge, an amateur team in Hawaii, impressing professional scouts enough that he signed with the San Francisco 49ers of the All-America Football Conference, a post-World War II rival to the National Football League. (He never went to college, though he turned down at least one football scholarship, to Ohio State.) The 49ers, who joined the N.F.L. in 1950, say that Yonamine was the first Asian-American to play pro football.

Kaname Yonamine (his full name is pronounced KA-na-may YO-na-MEE-nay) was born on June 24, 1925, in Olowalu, a village on the island of Maui, where his father, an Okinawan, had moved to find work in the sugar cane fields and met his mother, whose family was from Hiroshima. (He adopted the nickname Wally in high school, and it eventually became his legal name.)

Da Duke o' Flatbush

Managed Mets in Turbulent Time

Joe Frazier, the manager of the Mets in the turbulent period between the tenures of Yogi Berra and Joe Torre, died Tuesday in Broken Arrow, Okla. He was 88 and a longtime Broken Arrow resident.

The team was getting bad in those days, and would become abysmal.

In Frazier’s only full year as manager, the Mets won 86 games and finished third in the East Division of the National League. With a rotation that included Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Jon Matlack, the team had excellent pitchers but few good hitters. Frazier’s ship listed in 1977. The Mets’ owners were unwilling to bid for newly minted free agents, prompting Seaver, Matlack and the slugging outfielder-first baseman Dave Kingman to criticize management. Frazier was fired at the end of May after the Mets won only 15 of their first 45 games. A few weeks later, Seaver and Kingman were traded. Matlack was traded after the season. The Mets finished in last place in 1977 and in the next two years. Attendance fell sharply just as the Yankees turned into a powerhouse. Frazier was succeeded as manager by Torre and never managed in the majors again.

Made Batters Nervous

Pitching for the Yankees from 1958 to 1961, the right-handed Duren would sometimes deliver at least one warm-up pitch high against the screen, presumably to intimidate the batter soon to face him.

2 baseball players

Phil Cavarretta, National League M.V.P. in 1945

Associated Press-Phil Cavarretta at Wrigley Field in Chicago in 1945.


 Phil Cavarretta played 20 seasons for the Chicago Cubs and won the National League’s most valuable player award and batting championship in 1945, the last time the Cubs captured a pennant. Playing first base and the outfield at Wrigley Field from 1934 to 1953, and serving as the Cubs’ player-manager for two and a half seasons, Cavarretta became one of the most popular figures in the team’s history. A left-handed batter with an unremarkable 5-foot-11, 175-pound frame, Cavarretta was hardly a power hitter in the mold of the Cubs stars Hack Wilson, Ernie Banks and Sammy Sosa. He had only 95 career home runs. But he had 1,977 hits and a .293 career batting average.

Walt Dropo, Star at UConn and 1950 Rookie of the Year

Great name; names aren't made that way any more.

At UConn, Dropo, at 6 feet 5 inches and 220 pounds, was the first baseman in baseball, the center in basketball and an offensive and defensive end in football. When he graduated in 1947, he was the university’s career scoring leader in basketball, UConn said, and still ranks No. 2 in career scoring average, at 20.7 per game. After he finished college, the Providence Steamrollers of the Basketball Association of America tried to sign him. So did the Chicago Bears of the National Football League. The Red Sox won out with a $15,000 bonus and a Class AAA contract for $600 a month. Besides, he said later, “My first love was baseball.”

With the Tigers in 1952, he got a hit in 12 straight plate appearances over three games against the Yankees and the Washington Senators, tying the major league record set in 1938 by Pinky Higgins of the Red Sox. Dropo said his accomplishment was easy because “the first fastballs I saw, I hit.” During that hitting streak, he also matched another record that remains today, with 15 hits in a four-game stretch. 

A 58-year-old record.

Blazing Pitcher - Fastball Dazzled

2 obituaries, in the Times and the Journal.

Associated Press-Bob Feller hurled his third no-hitter July 1, 1950 with a 2-1 win over the Detroit Tigers in the opener of a twin bill at Cleveland.

Bob Feller, who died Wednesday at age 92, had one of the great fastballs in the history of baseball and at the time perhaps the sport's biggest star after Babe Ruth.

Whether apocryphal or not, one story has it that In the 1940 no-hitter, the story goes, White Sox center fielder Mike Kreevich protested a called strike, telling the umpire, "It sounded a little high."

And: As Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was said to have remarked after three Feller pitches blew by him, “That last one sounded a little low.”

In 1956, as Mr. Feller was preparing to retire, he was elected president of baseball's Players' Association, where he advocated for higher minimum salaries and against the reserve clause binding a player to his team for life. The clause wasn't lifted until 1975, effectively creating the free-agent market. "They call baseball the great American pastime but what is more un-American than tying a player to a club against his will?" he said after testifying before Congress in 1957.

Times:  When he returned from the war, he was better than ever, developing a sinker to go with his fastball and curve. He threw his second no-hitter, at Yankee Stadium, in April 1946, and struck out 348 batters that season, listed at the time as a major league record, eclipsing Rube Waddell’s 343 for the Athletics in 1904. (Waddell’s total was subsequently revised to 349.) 

Journal: He led the league in wins three more times after the war, but was perhaps a bit less dominant than before it. A favorite game among cognoscenti is to debate how many games he might have won if he had never gone to war. Mr. Feller often said he would easily have cracked 300 total wins. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility. 

Curiously, the Journal obit makes no mention of Jackie Robinson. The Times does:
Back in 1945, Feller, always outspoken, had created a controversy involving Robinson soon after Robinson had been signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers organization to break baseball’s color barrier. After pitching against Robinson in California on a postseason barnstorming tour, Feller told a reporter in Los Angeles that Robinson was too muscle-bound to handle major league pitching and expressed doubt that Robinson would be considered for the big leagues if he were white. Feller eventually acknowledged that he had been mistaken, but it appears he never expressed regrets directly to Robinson. He did say that he had taken pride in giving black players exposure through his barnstorming tours. And in his memoir, “Now Pitching, Bob Feller,” written with Bill Gilbert, he said it had been “extra meaningful” for him go into the Hall of Fame “with major league baseball’s first black player.” Robinson, in turn, said it was a pleasure to be inducted with Feller.

342 career home runs

That Santo was on a major league field, let alone starring alongside the future Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins, seemed remarkable. When he took a routine physical in 1959, on the brink of making his Cubs debut, Santo was found to have juvenile diabetes. He began taking insulin within two years, but kept his diabetes a secret from the Cubs until being named to his first All-Star team in 1963, fearing that management’s knowledge of his illness might have damaged his career. He did not allow the public to know of his diabetes until his final years with the Cubs.

He had four seasons in which he hit .300 and hit at least 30 home runs every year from 1964 to 1967. He was a mainstay of a superb Cubs infield of the 1960s, with Banks having switched to first base from shortstop, Glenn Beckert at second base and Don Kessinger at short.

Then he saw the black cat in Shea Stadium in 1969.

After various business ventures, Santo began working as a Cubs color commentator on WGN in the early 1990s, broadcasting alongside the legendary Harry Caray. As he battled the complications of diabetes as well as cancer, and continued his charitable work, his popularity grew. The Cubs retired his No. 10 at Wrigley Field in September 2003, and he stood and waved from the radio booth to the cheer of the crowd. The following year, his son Jeff made a film on his life, “This Old Cub,” which had its premiere at the Chicago Historical Society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/sports/baseball/04santo.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/sports/baseball/04santo.html?ref=obituaries

Ex-Yankee

Gil McDougald, the Yankees’ versatile All-Star infielder who played on five World Series championship teams but was remembered as well for a single at-bat resulting in one of baseball’s most frightening moments, died Sunday at his home in Wall Township, N.J. He was 82.

He led A.L. infielders in double plays at third base (1952), second base (1955) and shortstop (1957). He retired after the 1960 season when it appeared he would be selected in an expansion draft by the newly formed Washington Senators or Los Angeles Angels. 

Mentor to Mays

Artie Wilson, a pesky, slap-hitting shortstop in the Negro leagues who created a signing feud between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians after he hit .402 for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, a circumstance that may have cost him a major league career, died Oct. 31 in Portland, Ore. He was 90.

1948 is fully 7 years after Ted Williams hit .401, and it is Williams that is called the last man to bat .400 in a season.

Wilson played five years for Birmingham, where, in spite of having lost the top joint of his right thumb in a factory accident, he twice led the Negro American League in batting and became a mentor and friend to a teenage teammate, Willie Mays.

One of those players, one of those people, who sort of fall in between the cracks and become, or remain, unknown to the public at-large.


His sky-high average in 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, is thought to represent the last time anyone at the top level of professional baseball broke the .400 barrier. (Ted Williams, the last major league player to accomplish the feat, batted .406 in 1941.)

[Oops, I said .401 and was in error, for it .406 that Williams hit in 1941.]

In addition to his wife, the former Dorothy Daniels, whom he married in 1949, he is survived by their two children, Zoe A. Wilson Price, of Forsyth, Ill., and Arthur Lee II, of Honolulu; a daughter from a previous marriage, Jean Walden, of Youngstown, Ohio; a grandson, three granddaughters and nine great-grandsons. “A baseball team,” Dorothy Wilson said.

Clyde King

Hall of Fame Manager

Sparky Anderson, the first manager to win World Series championships with teams from both the National and American leagues, died on Thursday in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 76.

Getty Images

One of his players, Pete Rose, once declared, "I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit for Sparky."

George Lee Anderson, known to all as Sparky, was a Hall of Fame baseball manager who won World Series in Cincinnati and Detroit and was among the all-time leaders in career victories. Mr. Anderson, who died Thursday at age 76 of complications of dementia in a California hospice, came by his nickname for picking arguments in his playing days—a habit he developed to compensate for shortcomings with the bat.